The present invention relates to an ink-jet recording apparatus.
In the past, an ink-jet recording apparatus which ejects ink onto a recording medium, such as a sheet or a thin plastic plate, and records predetermined images, has been brought forth, and is now in practical use. Particularly, in recent years, greatly developed has been an ink-jet recording apparatus employing photo-curing type ink to record images onto an ink-non-absorbent recording medium, after which light rays irradiate the photo-curing type ink droplets deposited onto the recording medium, and forms the images. As such an ink-jet recording apparatus, developed is an ink-jet recording apparatus in which cation polymerizable photo-curing ink is used, and large amounts of light rays are irradiated at one time (for example, see Japanese Patent Application Publication Nos. 2004-203025, and 2004-255818).
In this ink-jet recording apparatus, for example, a single recording head for ejecting each color ink of Y (yellow), M (magenta), C (cyan) and K (black) is provided, and light irradiating sections are mounted downstream of each color recording head, with respect to conveyance direction of the recording medium. That is, after each color ink is deposited onto the recording medium, the light rays are irradiated onto each color ink from the light irradiating sections, and thereby, each ink is individually cured so that the images are recorded.
Further, in recent years, even when high resolution images are rapidly printed, in order to reduce a driving load of the recording head, an ink-jet recording apparatus using an interleave method has been developed, which records the images after thinned-out images are superimposed, (for example, see Japanese Patent Application Publication No. 2004-167812).
Meanwhile, in the ink-jet recording apparatus described in Japanese Patent Application Publication No. 2004-167812, plural recording heads for each color are provided, but as described above, due to the structure in which after each ink is deposited, the light irradiating sections irradiate light rays onto each ink, and each ink is individually cured, the problem is that each ink is separately deposited onto the recording medium, and the same colored ink droplets adjacent to each other pull at each other before curing. If such bleeding is generated, it may be impossible to obtain the desired quality images.
Further, since convex images are requested for the use of welfare or art, a “superposed ejection” method is used, in which the same colored ink droplets are repeatedly ejected to create the images. However, when the superposed ejection of the same color ink droplets is operated in the ink-jet recording apparatus, the deposited ink droplets expand widely, and the predetermined image quality cannot be obtained.